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posted by on Thursday December 08 2016, @10:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the more-like-a-massacre dept.

According to our dear friends over at Wired, we are losing the war on science. This interview with Shawn Otto, author of The War on Science [no-script hostile] ranges from the American presidential election to Albert Einstein:

His new book The War on Science explores ways that citizens can fight back against a creeping tide of anti-science nonsense promulgated by everyone from postmodern academics to greedy oil companies to nature-loving hippies. An important step is to make journalists understand that science and opinion should not be given equal weight.

"The purpose of a free press in a democracy is to hold the powerful accountable to the evidence," Otto says. "Journalists have really lost sight of that purpose, of their entire reason for being."

Fair enough. But things have gotten worse?

He fears that the war on science will only intensify once Donald Trump takes office in January. "I'm very concerned, as is the rest of the global scientific community," Otto says.

As a personal aside, I find it unlikely that the public, those who executed Socrates, burned the Library of Alexandria, and imprisoned Antoinio Gramsci, could fall for such a diaphanous fraud as the Republican attack on science! People back then were truly and profoundly stupid. But people today have the internet, and facebook, and a total misunderstanding of science, politics, ethics, and math. So, this will not end well? Help me, Soylentils, give me hope.


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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday December 09 2016, @06:12AM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday December 09 2016, @06:12AM (#439037) Journal

    It's amazing how much more accessible info has become. Want to read the papers of Euler, a famous 18th century mathematician? In 1990, it was hard. You'd probably need special permission-- the keepers of the documents would want to be sure you weren't a psycho out to destroy precious originals at the first opportunity, or a careless bozo who has no idea that old papers can be extremely fragile. If granted, you'd have to travel to whichever facility, probably in Germany, that was keeping them. If you got that far, there are still more barriers. Do you know Latin? Because that's the language Euler wrote his papers in.

    Today, Euler's papers are indeed only a few mouse clicks away. There are high quality digital scans of every paper he published, free for downloading. Lack of Latin is no problem, and not because of Google Translate. There are also English translations of his works, done by knowledgeable scholars specializing in such work, also free to download.

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